Black Friday Onto Sunday Morning

 Well, it is Sunday, and it is cold and I overslept. My ride to church will be coming soon. I need to catch up with my reports.

Friday: I ran spell check over my ten-minute play while waiting for KH, did some more downloading of music,I got the documents ready for court,  and some reading. 

When KH arrived, we went to Payless and lunch. Ninja of Japan is where we ate - every other place was closed. He was kind enough to accommodate my fasting and need to eat vegetarian, but the food was not all that impressive. We came back here and talked some more. We did a run through of the play. It is a little long. He laughed, so it works. When he left, the low level headache I had all day persisted, so I did no more writing. More reading online and a little of Carlos Fuentes.

14 English Words from Yiddish - some I knew, some I did not, but I have got to say it is proof the Jews have done more for us than ever has anti-Semitism.

I read one of Alain de Botton's books while in prison, and thought him a hoot, so I checked out The Brisbane Times' Eight books: A Booker winner’s slavery novel and more Alain de Botton. They were not so hot on the new one.

Also, from The Brisbane Times Book Review: Julia Baird’s rousing call to let grace drive our actions. I like this idea:

While this grace might be termed secular, Wright says that it seems to “require another element or dimension” in order to make sense of it. Julia Baird, too, is mostly concerned with a non-religious understanding of grace, but rather than Wright’s cosmic bolt from the blue, it’s of a more ordinary, more quotidian variety.

This is grace as an expression of the best in humanity: forgiveness, kindness, openness to the sheer wonder of the natural world and to the gift of life. And there is still mystery to this version of grace because it cannot be measured in purely transactional terms.

I did manage to get a story submitted, "Running Away From the Dying and the Dead" to Belmont Story Review

 Saturday: I was up early. The cleaning crew was expected, the cat needed to go out. I went back to Payless for tomatoes and manila envelopes. I prepared the documents I intended to file needed bigger envelopes. Then, I ran into a fellow from work who gave me a ride to the downtown post office, only it was closed. I walked over to the bus station, got my ride home. I had left around 9 and was back around 11. The rest of t of the day felt like an exercise in procrastination - especially if the goal was meant to be staring on again on "Love Stinks".

I did finally get to "Love Stinks" late in the day. Also, I wrote a long post on why America does not need a dictatorship that will see the light of day tomorrow. I downloaded more music, incurred more crashes, and got a few more things read.

 I spent some time catching up with the Times Literary Supplement:

Up the Ulua: Zora Neale Hurston’s quest for a Mayan ruin by Douglas Field (which left me wondering if, after all the neglect Hurston was subjected to, if the world is not going to the other extreme)

Mary Beard: A don’s life: What the papers say by Mary Beard (I got to agree with her that reading newspapers online is a convenience that also limits us)

She’s got a lovely bunch of coconuts: Lydia Davis shows us how it’s done by Heather Cass White made me wonder why I never heard of Lydia Davis, and the review hit me on a sore sport - my being able to put experience into words.

What has happened in this story? Two people’s emotional lives have been affected by a misplaced modifier. Though all three characters speak the same language, and want to transact the same business, a single word choice leaves two of them confused and self-doubting. Something has been lost in the translation of life into language, a danger that Davis, a translator of Proust and Flaubert, knows well. It is hard enough to move effectively from one language to another – even harder to move from experience to words.

Davis has made that difficulty, and the graceful, funny, awkward, surprising, unlikely, persuasive and moving ways in which it may be surmounted, her life’s work. Seen from a distance, each of her collections of stories – there have been nine so far, plus her novel, The End of the Story (1995), two collections of essays and innumerable translations – looks much like any of the others. Seen up close, however, they reflect different parts of her life. Her first books feature more drinking and divorce than her later ones. Our Strangers comes back more than once to ageing and loss. Davis’s process, meanwhile, remains consistent: she publishes constantly, in an array of outlets, large and small. Her acknowledgements sections are useful guides in themselves to the variety of publications active in any given decade since the 1970s. When she has between fifty and a hundred pieces of work, either newly written or newly revised, she publishes them as a book.

 What Sade did next: Novels and short stories written from confinement by Will McMorran does not improve my opinion of Sade (he wrote to shock and I do not see why he is even regarded for more than that), but I keep trying to understand.

Since Sade’s works became more widely available in France in the 1960s, readers and critics have unsurprisingly shown more interest in the books that previous generations were told they could not, or should not, read. What, after all, is the point of Sade if not to be shocking? The kind of shock literary texts deliver, however, tends to be short-lived. And Sade’s most extreme novels are anything but: hundreds of pages long, they demand considerable stamina of their readers, and of their readers’ capacity or desire to respond to the endless horrors they describe. While some may become desensitized as they progress, others may find that the violence becomes harder, rather than easier, to bear, and may consequently grind to a halt. Either way, Sade at his most shocking is not necessarily Sade at his most interesting. A novel such as Justine (1791), which maintains a (porously thin) veneer of respectability is, for example, a much more compelling text than the no-holds-barred version of the same story that Sade later offered in his much longer – and much more explicit – Nouvelle Justine (1799?).

For the novels in this new edition the veneer was a necessity rather than a choice. All three were written in the Charenton asylum to which Sade had been condemned by Napoleon. While he had been granted permission to write, his rooms were raided in 1807 by police who seized a manuscript entitled Les Journées de Florbelle ou la nature dévoilée (The Days of Florbelle or Nature Revealed), a work of libertinage that apparently rivalled his most notorious works in its ambition. After this second great loss – the first being the scroll of Les 120 journées de Sodome, taken from his cell during the fall of the Bastille – Sade made no further attempts to write the kind of fiction that had cemented his scandalous reputation. If a “late style” can be discerned in works such as La Marquise de Gange, Adélaïde de Brunswick and Isabelle de Bavière, it was thus to a great extent imposed on him: to reach his readers he first had to get past the censor. For many of his twentieth-century devotees, he sacrificed too much in order to do so. Francine du Plessix Gray describes the trio as “terribly proper little historical novels”, while Jean-Jacques Pauvert, a pioneering editor and biographer of Sade, evinces a sense not just of disappointment but almost of betrayal when he pronounces: “The Marquise de Gange is of no interest other than for indubitably being by Sade, and for the success with which he almost entirely erased himself from it”.

Sade, it appears, fooled more than just the censors. It seems baffling now that Pauvert could find no trace of the author in La Marquise de Gange when it is arguably Sade’s most playful and self-conscious novel....

About Cervantes, I have no doubts, and The quixotic inkblot: A bold reassessment of the European novel by Ian Ellison was of more interest, if not of anything I can use for myself.

A richly detailed reconstruction of the author’s life and Spain’s fertile cultural landscape, Cervantes the Poet offers a bold reassessment of the origin of the European novel. This is usually theorized as an admixture of classical epic poetry and chivalric romance, with Don Quijote standing as both the original and the best example. Where Ponce-Hegenauer offers truly exciting new perspectives is in her argument that lyric subjectivity and madness exert a greater influence on the novel than epic or romance. “What is evident”, she argues, is that Don Quijote, “by virtue of its continued relevance for so many formulations of modernity, contains a consistently recognizable figuration of the modern subject, a subject which remains mysterious”. It is Alonso Quijano’s descent into insanity and his self-reinvention as Don Quijote de la Mancha, in other words, rather than his wild adventures and the multilayered textual complexities of Cervantes’s narrative, that provides us with the blueprint for the modern novel and keep us gazing into the quixotic inkblot.

I learned of Pascal from Nietzsche, and I read The Pensees in prison, and I felt I needed to read Winning the wager: Pascal talks to our own spiritual ennui by Michael Moriarty. Pointed out something I have felt without really examining or naming.

This year France celebrates the 400th anniversary of the birth of Blaise Pascal. He died aged 39, having invented a calculating machine, produced pioneering work in mathematics and physics, and even designed a bus service for Paris. For those who know him chiefly as a mathematician and scientist, it might be surprising to learn that Pope Francis marked the birthday in June with an Apostolic Letter. This contained a biographical sketch of Pascal and an outline of his religious thought. Even for those aware of Pascal as a religious writer, this letter may have elicited a surprise. He was an adherent of the movement within Catholicism called Jansenism, which to its critics came dangerously close to Calvinism, and which was condemned in its time by the papacy. Besides, Pope Francis is a Jesuit, and Pascal devoted a fierce and sometimes very funny polemic, the Lettres provinciales (1657), to the Society of Jesus, accusing it of watering down and even distorting Christian morality.

***

It is in the philosophical, not the spiritual or theological domain, that Pascal’s originality lies. The key philosophical concept here is inquiétude, disquiet or restlessness, more generally associated with Malebranche and Locke. By “restlessness” Devillairs means the absence of an available and determinate relationship to truth and the good, a condition in which the desire for truth and happiness cannot be satisfied, but cannot be altogether discarded.

 Mermaids and unicorns: Why the welfare state may be preferable to tech utopia by Eric Rauchway left me wondering if we worry too much about AI taking jobs when it may outright kill us; that our tech billionaire class are a bunch of idiotic sociopaths.

In September the Associated Press reported on how supercomputers powering AI research use an extraordinary quantity of water as coolant: a series of questions posed to the large language model ChatGPT, run by the firm OpenAI, uses up about half a litre. A reasonable person might wonder whether that water would be better allocated to people and crops than to language-generating machines. Engineers at the waterworks in West Des Moines, Iowa – 6 per cent of whose reserves, in July 2022, went to Microsoft supercomputers powering ChatGPT and programs like it – wondered exactly that, arguing that future projects within its borders would have to be less thirsty so the district’s human residents could be assured of water.

A few weeks later the Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen issued a “techno-optimist manifesto” in which he defended artificial intelligence against its detractors, arguing that reasoning like that of the West Des Moines water engineers was tantamount to manslaughter, or worse: “We believe Artificial Intelligence can save lives … We believe any deceleration of AI will cost lives”. Andreessen averred that “deaths that were preventable by the AI that was prevented from existing is a form of murder [sic]”. (If that sentence went through an AI grammar checker, you can see that the technology requires substantial further investment before we can trust it with our lives.)

Scoffing at governments and universities in favour of free markets, Andreessen staked a claim to the future, which he apparently believes has a greater right to resources than the present. He is not alone in this thinking, versions of which emanate from his fellow Silicon Valley billionaires. They are not the first very rich men to believe that disproportionate quantities of scarce resources should, by right and reason, belong to them rather than to their fellows. And they are not the first to declare that the least interference with their investment schemes would be immoral or criminal. They are perhaps unusual in the oddly apocalyptic tone of their optimism, and in their success at getting themselves taken seriously by universities and governments – perhaps because many of us feel we are losing ground to machinery, in ways we cannot quite define.

In The Handover David Runciman argues that we have long since given over our world to artificial agents that are far more powerful than us, and often indifferent to our welfare. For centuries they have roamed the earth and divvied up its resources. They are called states and corporations. People designed these machines to do what we ourselves cannot: indefinitely remember, organize and endure.....

There was more read in other venues, that will need to wait to post. I need to get read y for church.

I leave with one more rejection of a story:

Thank you for sending us "Theresa Pressley Attends Michael Devlin’s Viewing". We sincerely appreciated the chance to read your work; however, we have decided it is not the right fit for us at this time.

We wish you the best of luck in finding a home for "Theresa Pressley Attends Michael Devlin’s Viewing" elsewhere.

With kind regards,
American Literary Review Staff

Well, I have raked that one over the coals.

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